Ukraine's tragic history

Ukraine remembers the Holodomor

AS the electoral turmoil faded into the background, Ukraine marked two important anniversaries last week. The first was eight years since the Orange Revolution of 2004. The second was eight decades since the Holodomor.

Holodomor literally means death by hunger. In 1932 and 1933, a vast famine in Soviet Ukraine killed three to seven million people, according to estimates. While people starved, the grain was shut away in barns for export. Many historians agree that the famine was man-made; some say it was genocide.

Yet the Holodomor is not widely known about outside Ukraine. In the 1930s, it was hushed up by many western correspondents in return for access to the Kremlin. Among them was Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who received the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the USSR. (There have been calls to revoke his Pulitzer posthumously, so far unsuccessful). One of the exceptions was Welsh journalist Gareth Jones whose reporting of the Ukrainian famine had him banned from the USSR. He was later killed in mysterious circumstances at the age of only 29. Meanwhile, the cover-up has left “profound consequences for Ukraine, which remains poorly understood in the West,” says Rory Finnin, a lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at Cambridge University, where Mr Jones had been a student.

Viktor Yushchenko, the former president of Ukraine, did a lot to raise awareness about the Holodomor. Kyiv now houses a stirring candle-shaped memorial and Holodomor museum. But the leader of the 2004 Orange Revolution has fallen from grace. In the October elections, Mr Yushchenko’s party, Our Ukraine, got just 1% of the vote, losing all its 72 seats in parliament. On the anniversary of the Orange Revolution last week only a small crowd gathered on the legendary Independence Square. Someone had brought along a portrait of Yulia Tymoshenko, the heroine of the Orange Revolution who remains behind bars. Another woman held a single orange.

The tragedy of 1932-1933 has become politicised. In his view of the Holodomor, the current president, Viktor Yanukovych, has differed from his predecessor. For the third year now, the commemorations took place without state support.

Even so, on November 23rd events went ahead in cities across Ukraine. People could taste the dishes made out of tree bark that were eaten during the famine. Other symbolic actions evoked the “uncelebrated weddings”, the “unrealised talents” and the “meetings that never took place”. This year, the focus was on those who saved others from starvation. Before dusk 2,000 people gathered under the Holodomor memorial in Kyiv, decorated with loaves of bread, bunches of wheat and a sea of candles. At 4pm, there was a moment of silence and people across Ukraine lit candles in their windows.

Octogenarian Kateryna, who grew up in the countryside before moving to Kyiv in the 1940s, was sitting beside a candle burning in her kitchen. She heaps sugar into her china teacup. “Three spoonfuls!”, she says. “In Ukraine we remember the hunger. Perhaps that is why we are fond of sugar”.

Big genocides?
Remember the European annihilation of tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions, of indigenous Native American men, women and children-- across North, Central and South America, including large islands like Cuba?
Well folks, the genocide failed, and Native Americans -- otherwise known as Latins or Hispanics or Mexicans or just Native American Indians -- have begun to recolonize their original homelands as the White population shrinks due to a falling birthrate.
But the shrinking majority doesn't like it and is desperately trying to halt the recolonization, often and unfortunately with the help of Asians and Blacks living in the Americas. But it won't work. The shift has begun.

Indeed the impoverished "independent" orange Ukraine as well as the other "independent" west supported craphole - Gruzia earn well below the World average (~$6K/Yr Ukraine and ~ $4K/Yr Gruzia) what is no wonder considering both by command of their western owners chose to destroy the normal relationships with Russia and lost the Russia market.

And the most humiliating fact for Ukraine is they lost more people since the Ukraine "independence" than during the Holodomor.

"Ukraine’s population decline

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s demographics are even unhealthier than Russia’s. While Russia lost 5 million people between 1990 and 2010, the Ukranian population went from 52 million people in 1990 to 45 million in 2010, a decline of 7 million people – and much larger relative to size.

The Ukranian male life expectancy is with 61.8 years almost equally low as the Russian (where the female life expectancy is lower in the Ukraine (73.5) than in Russia (74.0)).

The average Ukrainian woman gives birth to just 1.39 children, leading to a current population decline of 0.6 percent per year, much faster than Russia. Only Moldova, Bulgaria and Georgia presently have a faster annual population decline.

The Ukranian population too is forecast to decline further over the coming decades, to anywhere near 36 million people in 2050 and another 6 million fewer by the end of this century."

Brilliant analysis, and that's why in March 1939 Britain and France rushed to guarantee Poland's borders and make an agreement that rapidly turned into a military alliance. I see the teaching of history in Putin's Russia continues the illustrious and oh so "truthful" Soviet tradition. So here's a little song for you. Don't worry if don't understand the final verse, plenty of others do.

Please remember Poland signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in 1932. Therefore both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union broke their respective non-aggression pacts with Poland in September 1939 (both were supposed to last 10 years). Hardly anything to be proud of. Hardly puts you in a position to preach to anyone else, because the Second World War in Europe began in September 1939.

I'll qualify that a bit. Ideologically many Nazis, e.g. Theodor Eicke (founder of the Nazi concentration camp system and the first commandant of KL Dachau) were most certainly inspired by Soviet methods.

Among the leading executioners in Ukraine in the 1930s was Pavel Postyshev who served Stalin loyally and in January 1933 was sent to Ukraine with thousands of Russian party cadres under orders to stamp out any remaining opposition to Stalin’s rule. As Stalin’s emissary Postyshev was the real power in the Party, overshadowing the then first secretary Stanislav Kosior.

During the Holodomor in Ukraine, Pavel Postyshev, as Stalin's close 'comrade-in-arms', was charged with eliminating all opposition to collectivization particularly within the party ranks. He personally oversaw the Russification of the Party membership and of Ukraine's cultural and educational institutions. Records show that due to Postyshev's efforts over 100,000 members of the Com-party in Ukraine were purged, with many arrested and executed.

In time Postyshev, however, raised Stalin's displeasure and in January 1937 was demoted to the post of first secretary of the Kuibyshev Oblast Party Committee. A year later in 1938 during Stalin's 'Great Terror' he was arrested and in 1939 executed. Thus Postyshev met the same fate he personally had condemned many thousands of others.

Holocaust denial is illegal in many countries, and quite right, too. These are undeniable facts and saying that it didn't happen or that it wasn't that bad is deeply insulting to anyone who values human life.

"Who remembers the Armenians?" quipped Hitler. But he was an amateur compared to Stalin, who joked: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

And yet they were both wrong. That is why I'm sure with time Holodomor denial will also become illegal in many countries. The sooner you realise that, the better.

Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands makes a compelling case for the oft forgotten economic imperatives behind this Stalinist engineered famine. The only caveat is that the masses of starved peasants and kulaks were disproptionately Ukrainian. One of the valuable side effects (to Stalinists) is that this was a dreadful blow to Ukrainian nationalism. Also, Stalin was not above singling out ethnic groups - see Chechens, Volga Germans among others - during his reign. Then again Stalinist terror killed more Russians than any other ethnic group. For that matter Stalin even terrorized his own homeland Georgia.

You must be happy to learn that Yanukovich has accepted resignation of Mykola Azarov's government that will stay on in an interim capacity.

Azarov was elected to parliament in Oct. and is not expected to be re-appointed.

Azarov's two and a half years as prime minister have not led to significant economic revival. Maybe it follows that, because he is Russian, he is to blame for all the ills you have discovered. But I hear his sons have made fortunes. Is there a connection ?

According to sociological survey, today only 5% of Ukraine’s population lives like European middle class having all creature comforts. The rest of Ukrainian population has very much similar incomes. Today average Ukrainian family spends 53% of their income on foodstuffs. More than 40% of the families spend over 60% of their income on food. According to the international standards, these people can be considered paupers if they spend over 60% of their income on food. If 80% is spent then it’s absolute poverty.
Who’s to blame for the existing status quo today?

Another point worth noting is that the Politbureau issued in 1932 an order forcing everybody to have an internal passport but no passports were issued to designated people 'without rights' which included peasants in villages, all in an attempt to prevent masses of hungry country people from attempting to look for food in cities. This Soviet internal passport practice, that became known as 'propiska', was maintained for many decades allowing state security to monitor closely all people movements accross the whole country.

Most disgusting, the US "liberators" were commiting genocide by starvation of millions German POW:

The problem was not supplies. There was more than enough material stockpiled in Europe to construct prison camp facilities. Eisenhower's special assistant, general Everett Hughes, had visited the huge supply dumps at Naples and Marseille and reported: "More stocks than we can ever use. Stretch as far as eye can see." Food should not have been a problem, either. In the U.S., wheat and corn surpluses were higher than they had ever been, and there was a record crop of potatoes. The army itself had so much food in reserve that when a whole warehouse was dropped from the supply list by accident in England it was not noticed for three months. In addition, the International Red Cross had over 100,000 tons of food in storage in Switzerland. When it tried to send two trainloads of this to the American sector of Germany, U.S. Army Officers turned the trains back, saying their warehouses were already overflowing with ICRC food which they had never distributed.

Nonetheless it was through the supply side that the policy of deprivation was carried out. Water, food, tents, space, medicine--everything necessary for the prisoners was kept fatally scarce. Camp Rheinberg, where Corporal Liebich would fetch up in in mid-May, shivering with dysentery and typhus, had no food at all when it was opened on April 17. As in the other big "Rhine meadow" camps, opened by the Americans in mid-April, there were no guard towers, tents, buildings, cooking facilities, water, latrines, or food.

"Cable...dated 31 May states 1,890,000 prisoners of war and 1,200,000 disarmed German forces on hand. Best available figures at this Headquarters show prisoners of war in ComZ910,980, in ComZ transient enclosures 1,002,422 and in Twelfth Army GP 965,125, making a total of 2,878,537 and an additional 1,000,000 disarmed German forces Germany and Austria."

Of course it was opportunistic and shameful. I remember the late president Lech Kaczyński stating that very clearly in his Westerplatte speech of 2009. You rightly point out that this was a small patch of land predominantly populated by Poles and I could add that it was no less shamefully taken by force from Poland in 1920 when the country was fighting for its very survival against a massive Bolshevik invasion. But two wrongs don't make a right and even if in 1938 not a single shot was fired (after all, the Czech didn't fight), with the benefit of hindsight, there is no controversy in saying that it was wrong. (It's certainly not an issue between Poland and Czech Republic today.)

What is objectionable is imputing that Poland was a party in the Munich Agreement (it wasn't) or that at any stage it collaborated with Nazi Germany or fought "side by side" with German troops the way the Soviet Union did following the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact and the signing of its secret protocols. Shameful it most certainly was, but the Zaolzie takeover was not a crime against humanity or even a contributing factor to the Second World War.

kpxoxol's extremely selective "arguments" do not merit debate. Discussions at such a low level are pointless. After all he is denying Soviet responsibility for anything including the Holodomor genocide, which is the subject of the above article. On the other hand, I would stress that at least in the first half of its existence the Soviet Union was by definition genocidal.

Pasternak said after visiting the Ukraine, " what I saw could not be expressed in words. There was such,inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract, it would not fit within the bounds of consciousness. I fell ill. For an entire year I could not write."

Also one of his poems contains an allusion to the famine:
"noone comes to the latch at the gate".